Advertising

The DOJ’s AdTech Suit Against Google Is Anything but Unconventional

The U.S. Department of Justice and eight states recently sued Google, claiming it runs its digital ad business to unfairly advantage its...

How Big Media Handed Digital Advertising to Big Tech

The current structure of digital advertising markets makes the Google-Facebook duopoly an unavoidable trading partner for every party in the content consumption...

Big Tech’s Fight Over Privacy: Could Facebook Win an Antitrust Lawsuit Against Apple?

Do the new iOS 14 privacy features violate antitrust laws? If Facebook brings an antitrust suit against Apple, as it is reportedly...

Should Facebook Pick a Side?

Boycott organizers want Facebook to “pick a side” and align its corporate operations with aggressive activism on issues such as racism and...

Why Most Advertisers Can’t Afford to Boycott Facebook

While big brands can afford to pause their addiction to Facebook, most advertisers cannot participate, as they have become so dependent on...

Google’s and Facebook’s Grip on Digital Advertising Markets

Since July 2019, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority has been conducting an extensive investigation of the digital advertising market. In its preliminary report on...

Can Google Mobilize Its Users to Lobby Elected Officials?

Google has an 87 percent market share in the search business and the potential to mobilize more voters than the Democratic primaries, according to...

Twitter Refused to Promote the New Capitalisn’t Episode: This Is a Problem for Free Speech (and for American Health Care)

Twitter banned political ads from its platform but has full discretion in deciding what constitutes a "political ad." The Stigler Center tried to promote...

The Intersection of Privacy, Data, and Competition

The issues around technology, data, and privacy are complicated, but solving them is less tricky that many companies would have Congress believe. Editor’s note: The...

How the Adtech Market Incentivizes Profit-Driven Disinformation

If we want to solve the disinformation crisis, we need to fix the perverse incentives created by the online advertising market through structural and...

LATEST NEWS

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.